A Conceptual Graph Approach to Support Multiperspective Development Environments

This paper demonstrates an application of Conceptual Graphs (CGs) in the area of software engineering. We employ CGs as a meta-representation language to enhance consistency checking within a multiperspective development environment, i.e. one which employs and utilises a number of ViewPoints. We have built a ViewPoint-based prototype called the √iewer+CG to show such application of CGs. A ViewPoint is a loosely coupled, locally managed, self-contained object. It encapsulates representation knowledge, development knowledge, and specification knowledge of a problem domain. ViewPoints constitute partial specifications which can be independently constructed by a group of developers. Thus a complex and large-scale application can be decomposed into, and jointly managed as, a collection of ViewPoints. Partitioning development tasks and specifications in this manner necessitates a consistency checking procedure to ensure that the ViewPoints can consistently work as an 'integrated' whole. The difficulties in constructing such procedure arise from the diversity of ViewPoint representation styles. We employ CGs to provide meta-representation of ViewPoints. As CGs form a strong basis for logical reasoning, we are able to use the resulting concepts and relations from the metarepresentation to establish consistency checking rules within and across ViewPoints. By abstracting a ViewPoint specification up one level to CGs, we are able to augment a ViewPointsbased environment with an automated consistency checking procedure which is independent of ViewPoint representation styles.